Background In developing countries like Bangladesh, self-medication has become a predicament associated with health risks and clinical complications. To date, no studies have been conducted on the practice of self-medication among the indigenous population living in Chittagong Hill Tract (CHT). Objectives This study was aimed to determine the prevalence of self-medication and analyzing the factors associated with it among the indigenous population in CHT. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted from late October to early December 2020; among different indigenous group populations residing in the three districts of CHT aged 18 or more. A pre-tested and semi-structured questionnaire was developed to collect data on socio-demographic characteristics, health status, frequency of self-medication, reasons for self-medication in last one year, as well as other variables. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to assess associated factors with self-medication. Results A total of 1350 people from different indigenous populations were interviewed, among whom 49.9% practiced self-medication. The rate of self-prescribed antibiotics usage (80.9%) was significantly higher compared to other drugs. Self-prescribed medications were mostly used for diarrhea and food poisoning (60.6%), cough, cold and fever (51.4%), and headache (51.4%). A common source of self-prescribed medicines was community or retail pharmacy and the most reported reason for self-prescribed medication was the long-distance of healthcare facilities from home. Conclusion The prevalence of self-medication is substantially high among indigenous people and the effect is alarming. Particular concern is the misuse of antibiotics and analgesic drugs. Increasing awareness among the population of the negative effect of self-medication and implementation of proper policies and actions are urgently needed to prevent self-medication among indigenous population in Bangladesh.

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard is one of the most promising wireless access technologies for Machine to Machine (M2M) communications because of its high data rates, low latency and economies of scale. M2M communications typically involves a large number of autonomous devices sending traffic in a coordinated manner (and possibly even simultaneously), therefore creating an uplink-heavy trend which needs an efficient radio resource management scheme. The conventional scheduling algorithms and performance metrics are not suitable for M2M systems because of the different characteristics and service requirements of M2M traffic. In this paper, we analyze the performance of an enhanced delay sensitive uplink scheduler in context of LTE TDD configurations 0 and 1 for delay sensitive event based M2M traffic. We show that unlike an ordinary equal capacity fair scheduler, our proposed delay sensitive scheduler can make utmost use of the maximally uplink-biased TDD configuration 0, attaining higher capacity and maximizing the chance of satisfying packet delay budget of M2M traffic. We also introduce a new performance metric called "Effective Allocated Bits/RB pair" to measure the allocation efficiency of a scheduler, evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduler in terms of this metric and identify the scope of possible improvements.

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One of the key characteristics of cellular Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications is the generation of small data packets by a large number of devices. The excessive control signaling required for dynamic scheduling of such uplink data in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard impedes the deployment of LTE networks for M2M communications. Traditional Semipersistent scheduling (SPS) reduces the load on control channel but it is currently only developed for constant data rate voice packets. For realistic M2M environments, nondeterministic data traffic needs to be served in a resource efficient way. In this paper, we propose a buffer based adaptive SPS scheme for the LTE uplink which does not require the control signaling overhead of dynamic scheduling, but offers the same flexibility of increasing or decreasing the number of allocated radio resource blocks according to the latest buffer status of the device. We examine the influence of SPS periodicity on quality of Service (QoS) satisfaction of delay constrained stochastic M2M traffic and compare the performance of the proposed adaptive SPS scheme with rigid fixed allocation SPS schemes for such traffic. We also demonstrate how the adaptive SPS scheme can be implemented in a resource efficient way to meet the QoS requirements of a large number of machine type nodes through data aggregation.